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The H Roundup - critical Java 0day, Firefox 15 and HP security holes

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H: the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

The week kicked off with the news that the then current version of Java contained a highly critical security hole which allowed untrusted Java applets to completely disable Java's sandbox security. As the vulnerability was already actively being exploited in the wild, all users were advised to disable Java applets to protect themselves. It took until Thursday evening for Oracle to fix the vulnerability with the release of Java 7 Update 7 despite the company having known about the flaw since April.

Mozilla published Firefox 15 for the desktop with better add-on memory management and a new debugger, and for Android with a new tablet UI. The Thunderbird 15 email client was also released, introducing its instant messaging capabilities. The Raspberry Pi received improved media playback with MPEG-2 and VC-1 codec licences available to buy.

The GNOME project released GNOME 3.6 Beta for users and developers to test the latest revision of the Linux desktop environment, Canonical planned to drop the alternate installer for Ubuntu 12.10 and Linus gave an insight into when and how we might see Linux 4.0.

Featured Articles

This week, The H examined the publicly available exploit code for the new critical Java 0day vulnerability, while Kai Wähner took a look at free integration frameworks on the Java platform. In the Kernel Log, Thorsten Leemhuis looked at recent kernel developments, including Linux graphics support, and in a new Kernel Comment he asked why some open source developers contribute to the reputation that Linux has bad support for current hardware.